Creative Director for The Banner Saga Talks Kickstarter, RPG Heroes, and Story in Games

I first saw the Kickstarter trailer for The Banner Saga the same day I was introduced to a forthcoming, innovative story telling game for kids. In the middle of my introduction to Story Realms by Escapade Games, I had a bit of an epiphany. As I listened to Julian Leiberan-Titus of Escapade weave a tale through the guise of a game, I quite suddenly saw the connection between modern gaming and the prehistoric story-tellers spinning tales of love and bravery around a campfire even before they could be written down. The results of that epiphany will be something I will be writing more about in the coming weeks, including interviews with the people over at Escapade and possibly others. For now I will just say, my ears were still ringing a couple of hours later when GeekDad Jonathan Liu sent me the following video from Kickstarter:

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Needless to say I was instantly intrigued. Apparently I wasn’t alone! The Kickstarter campaign funded at 723%, creating an opportunity for the three storytellers at Stoic to expand and improve their project in unexpected ways. This week I finally got an opportunity to sit down with Alex Thomas, Creative Director for The Banner Saga and discuss their outrageously successful Kickstarter campaign, the corporate game industry, Eyvind Earle, and storytelling in video games.

Wecks: So it’s really too bad about your Kickstarter campaign. I know you were really hoping to get more out of it.

Thomas: Tell me about it. This brings up a funny story; we knew all the way back in January we were planning to do a Kickstarter campaign, encouraged by our friends at White Whale, who had recently had a successful campaign for their game God of Blades. At that time, if you were lucky you could raise $30,000, tops.

Anyway, putting together a Kickstarter campaign was way more work than you would think. After Double Fine came out with what was by far the coolest pitch I’ve ever seen, we spent three days writing, filming, scoring and editing our Kickstarter video and we all sat down, watched it and… it suuuucked. Absolutely pit-of-your-stomach hideous. We’re no Tim Schafer. So we’re all sitting a little despondent at the local pub that evening and Arnie says “Do we really need Kickstarter? I’ll borrow some cash from my family, we’ll pay it back, we’ll just get back to production.” Anyway, after a much-deserved berating we decide to scrap the whole thing, hit it harder the next day and instead of trying to be clever, we just talked about what we wanted to do as honestly and passionately as we actually are. I remind him of that conversation almost daily. He might tell the story differently but that’s a perk of being the guy who does all the interviews.

Wecks: Yeah, I bet he would tell that story differently. Seriously though, what the heck was that? It’s like you guys went to Vegas put a nickel in the slots and came up Jokers. OK, there was a lot more work behind it than that, so it’s a bad analogy. But it must have felt that way. When did you guys know something special was happening?

Thomas: Well, it’s not the worst analogy I’ve ever heard. It’s true that we put a huge amount of effort and thought into the project, but in terms of timing we hit the jackpot, and we’re profoundly aware of that. It definitely felt that way. We put up our project at 12 am that Monday because we were hoping people would notice it when they rolled into work for the week and within minutes had dozens of backers. We hadn’t even sent out an email about it or posted it to Facebook. It kept going up. To this day I have no idea how they were finding it. Then at about an hour and a half somebody bought one the big $5,000 prizes and we nearly lost our minds. Eventually I went home around 4 am, tried to sleep and my wife, who was worried about meeting our minimum goal of $100,000, asked if we were able to get the page live. I told her we had already made about $20,000 and she mumbled something about that being ridiculous. That was definitely the moment for me.

Wecks: Why do you guys think you did so well? I have my own ideas, but I want to hear yours first. I mean besides the obvious stuff — quality Kickstarter presentation, etc. What is it about The Banner Saga and what it represents that seems to have touched a nerve?

Thomas: It’s definitely speculation on my part, but we’ve gotten a lot of hints from people who wrote impossibly glowing emails. From all the feedback we’ve gotten, it tends to fall into one of two categories: we’re making a game that tapped directly into their own personal nostalgia or longing, or that we personally represent the love of gaming and making games in a way that they want to support. Usually it’s a little of both. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think any of this has gone to our heads, but I wanted to give you my impression of the degree of feedback we’ve seen. It’s incredibly humbling and touching.

Wecks: I can tell you what did it for me. The first words out of your mouth on the video were, “deep, strategic, tactical game” and “strong story.” Basically, from that point forward I was salivating like Pavlov’s dog. Then Arnie comes along and says basically, “Yeah, we based the art on Sleeping Beauty,” and I just about fell over dead. I’d like to take all of those apart and look at them separately. Sound good?

Thomas: You got it! But just to mention it briefly, I think what you’re saying is exactly what the major appeal was. I grew up on stuff like Final Fantasy Tactics and XCOM along with a heavy dose of games like Baldur’s Gate and Chrono Trigger. Those games were a part of my identity growing up. And like a lot of people who grew up parallel to me, I wondered where the heck those games went. Our big question with The Banner Saga was always “Is it just us?” and that was something we couldn’t have answered before Kickstarter.

Final Fantasy Tactics

Wecks: You’ve been in the gaming industry for a while, so what is your answer to that question? How did those games disappear? It isn’t like they didn’t sell. What do you think happened?

Thomas: One of the terms you hear thrown around a lot when you’re working for a big publisher is “opportunity cost.” In simple terms, this just means that if a publisher wants to release a product within “X” amount of time with “Y” budget, the decision of what that project will be depends entirely on what will make the most profit. They’ll look at all of their options and say “this one is the most profitable,” or has the most profit potential. Lesser options are pushed aside, or delayed indefinitely. I’m simplifying a bit, but if you’re into making money, that’s probably what you’re doing.

In the meantime, the genre in question has probably already been taken to the limit of its maximum cost-to-profit ratio back when it was the hot new thing. Not many publishers are willing to take a chance on an outdated genre, if they think there’s a better option. Paradox Interactive — who I really respect — and publishers like them who do take chances can get reputations for being “hit or miss.”

I should also say that I think they haven’t really gone away. You can find modern games from almost every genre, and they’re probably doing about as well as they were back in the day, which looks miniscule by modern standards. What I think many of us including myself lament is that they never made the transition to the big-time. Who wouldn’t want to see their favorite games made with top-tier budgets and technology?

Wecks: What do you mean when you say “a deep strategic tactical game?” What kind of game play are we talking about? I see some kind of turn-based combat in the Kickstarter video, and it looks like you are choosing dialogue. Tell me something about the game experience you are aiming for?

Thomas: Combat’s one of those things we’re really looking forward to talking about more very soon as we get ready to release our free multi-player standalone. As much as I love old turn-based strategy games, I recognize looking at them critically that for the most part there’s a heavy emphasis on just comparing and shifting around stats. You can grind until your stats are better to make forward progress, and that’s not exactly a compelling tactical system. On the flip side is something like chess, a game with no numbers at all and strategy in its purest form. I’m not saying we’re going to be the next chess. We’re shooting for a balance by focusing on the importance of building a team whose abilities play off each other and where you need finesse to beat your opponent, not just bludgeoning your way through a fight. I know this all sounds like rhetoric until we start getting into the meat of the combat design. Although we can’t talk about the exact mechanics quite yet, we think it’s an idea that hasn’t really been seen much in strategy games.

Wecks: When I was a kid, one of my very favorite books was the Choose Your Own Adventure book Prisoner of the Ant People by R. A. Montgomery. I loved that book and read it again and again, because I had influence. I got to make decisions about what happened to the characters in the book! Then a few years ago the first Mass Effect came out — maybe you’ve heard of it? — and suddenly I felt that same sense of wonder all over again. I got to help tell the story, and what I did mattered for the game. It felt like a choose your own adventure movie! When you say “strong story” I hope this is what you are talking about. Do I have influence in the narrative of the game? Am I on the right track?

Thomas: From the start of the design we intended to make each of our three main systems (combat, travel and conversation) influence the others in exactly the way you’re talking about here. To summarize briefly; the story involves you and your people trying to escape what seems to be the literal end of the world which is sweeping slowly across the land. The travel scenes from the video are actual game-play which are akin to a cross between King of Dragon Pass and Oregon Trail. You’re not responsible just for a single character or a party, but for an entire society of people, and that opens up a lot of options people haven’t played with much in role-playing games.

Travel is part of the game experience in The Banner Saga

As you travel events will happen — your clansmen get in disputes, supplies run low and a wide variety of other unexpected issues come up that you have to deal with. Making decisions during travel can affect the difficulty or frequency of combat, and in turn barely surviving a fight doesn’t return you to full health afterward. You know you’ll be in trouble if you get in another fight soon, but making camp to rest will chew up time. Time is a key element to the game, and events can change based on when you encounter them. Through these smaller events you’re forming the story of your caravan, and through primarily dialogue you unravel the mystery of what’s happening to the world and what you can do to change things. One of our key goals has been to let bad things happen and to allow the player to deal with mistakes and keep them. Being a smaller, indie project has given us the ability to mess with the world in a way that bigger developers may shy away from. If your home town goes up in flames, you haven’t lost the game. It just keeps going. What is important to you, as the player, should be to do the best you can for you, your friends and your people.

Wecks: As much as I enjoyed Mass Effect, one of the things that seemed to hold it back to me was the whole first person shooter genre. It is kind of hard to tell a compelling story when the goal of the game play is basically slaughter everyone you can for dubious reasons (such as just because they’re mercenaries), then steal anything you find (including from your allies), and solve every problem with a gun. I don’t think it lends itself to very good characters — they’re predictable and boring. In The Banner Saga promos you seem to be hinting that you want to put together that same kind of story-driven game with a different genre of game play. How do you see the genre of game play influencing your story? What can you do in a tactical strategy game which you cannot do in a first person shooter?

Thomas: This gets into what compelled us to make this game. Predictability nullifies a good story like nothing else will, and if your game-play encourages you to be a bi-polar, kleptomaniac lunatic, it’s hard to rationalize your actions. We really set out to focus first on telling a story, and to create game-play that supported that story. I don’t believe you can develop these things in a vacuum, and it can be a huge hurdle to have your game-play dictated before you’ve even come up with a concept. By contrast, we’d come up with some story that struck us as compelling, then worked in some game-play which supported it, that in turn informed the story and caused us to rethink other game-play, and so on and so forth until we felt like we had achieved some harmony throughout the game.

I think that’s why we ended up with a travel system that’s a little unusual: it solved a lot of problems like pacing, screwing around when there’s a world to save or, in general, a lack of good motivation. To bring up points that you mentioned, we don’t even let the player loot chests, grind on random encounters, and solve every problem with a fight, and we don’t think they’ll miss it. We don’t even have money in the game, because it has no relevance to the gameplay. From our perspective it’s an incredible chance to try something new, and though we know it’s not going to revolutionize gaming for the shooter crowd it’s an opportunity almost nobody gets in this industry.

Wecks: Shepard as a bi-polar, kleptomaniac lunatic — I kind of like that. It seems like a pretty good way to describe him or her.

Thomas: For the record, right off the bat I should make it very clear that while you referenced Mass Effect, I was just giving a more general description that could apply to practically any RPG protagonist. The last thing we need is some headline like “Ex BioWare Indie Developers Think Mass Effect Is Dumb!” because I truly, sincerely love the games and the genre. Heck, that’s why I joined the company!

Wecks: Fair enough, I will take responsibility for applying your generalized statement to Shepard. I still think it is a reasonable description, and I loved the games as well. Getting back to the relationship between story and game play, it sounds like for you story came first, or is at least an equal component to the game play. I would guess that had something to do with the success of your Kickstarter campaign.

Thomas: I would agree that we started with story, which is generally an unheard-of luxury for the industry. It’s interesting that you mention story being equal to game-play as a cause for our success because one of our bigger failings was (I believe) in not providing a great explanation of the key systems and how they come together. We messaged “kind of like some other games you may enjoy” but that was it, and I really think we have something pretty unique, fun and interesting here. After the release of our announcement trailer, we were surprised to find that the majority of viewers thought the travel scenes were just cinematics. So all of that is something we’ve been working towards clarifying better as we get back to production.

Wecks: There is another interesting comment you make about story in the first little clip during the video:

There is a huge world changing event happening and it’s not just about are you the guy who can stop it. It’s not about destroying a villain or overcoming a major obstacle. It’s about survival. It’s about, what do you do when something completely out of your control happens. What do you do with your family? What do you do to save your kin?

So what does that mean? It sounds like you’re trying to make a break here from other video game models which seem to rely heavily on these obstacles and villains. Am I right? If so, why are you tired of them, and what do you want to put in their place: after all, villains often drive stories?

Thomas: Yeah, that setup is at the core of our story. One of our major inspirations for the story has been great TV miniseries like Game of Thrones or Deadwood, and other media that isn’t actually interactive. My personal favorite is The Wire. There’s one recurring theme to all of these stories I find really compelling— there’s no bad guy, just stories about people. You might say Al Swearengen or Stringer Bell are villains, but I don’t agree with that. They all think they’re doing the right thing for themselves and they’re all striving to make their lives better in a different way from their “good guy” counterparts, in a believable way. To a large degree they’re even likable, despite their actions. Who is the villain in your life? Do they know they’re the villain? People just don’t work like that, and when you see it in a story it often doesn’t ring true.

Villains can be lots of fun and a convenient focus for a interactive story, but there are plenty of games that give you a baddy to fight against. We thought the more unusual and interesting approach would be to imagine a conflict without a clear focus. What do you do if there’s nobody to blame for the end of the world? What if you know there’s no god to believe in or guide you? What if you don’t even know what death means for you? What if you’re completely alone but dammit you’re not giving up and laying down because you’re a freaking viking? What’s going to happen next? I hope the player has no idea. I think that’s pretty cool.

Prince Philip follows Princess Aurora in Disney's Sleeping Beauty

Wecks: So whySleeping Beauty and why animation? The trend in games seems to be to try like mad (and fail) to cross the uncanny valley. Why go back? What do you mean when you say “there is a soul to animation?” I have to confess, part of me thinks this is just a budget decision, not really an artistic decision.

Thomas: How dare you, sir! How dare you? In all honesty, we went with 2D animation because I have a love for it that defies rational thought. In my formative years I was enthralled by 2D animation in the purest sense. It’s like when you read an interview with some director who said his dad brought him to see some movie and he was so blown away by it he knew right there he was going to make movies. Well, I became a 2D animation major at UCF right as the bottom fell out of the market and Disney began laying off the animation staff. I didn’t see any professional future in it and dropped out of college to work on my other love, games, at Wolfpack Studios, who were making Shadowbane at the time.

To me, 2D animation is like magic, the simple idea that you can draw something with your hand, and it actually comes to life and moves and thinks was something that has never gone away for me. If I didn’t care, we’d probably be doing it in that puppet style that’s become popular lately because it’s ten times quicker to produce. I have a deep appreciation for 3D animation as well but watching Rats of NIMH and Snow White on VHS tapes blew my young, squishy mind.

So on a less personal level, when we had nailed down the story and basic gameplay we started looking at a ton of different art styles we could go with. We actually tried a wide range of art styles but nothing was really striking us, which is when Arnie thought of Sleeping Beauty. We loaded it up and we immediately knew that was it. It was one of those art styles that you look at and can’t imagine it ever existing again because it was conceived and perfected by a single man named Eyvind Earle, who was the art director on Sleeping Beauty. We instantly knew we were going to try to do it and we’re lucky enough to have someone talented enough to make it work – I don’t think there are many artists working today who could do it. Earle’s considered a master painter for a reason.

Wecks: Just personal opinion here, but I have always felt that Sleeping Beauty was the most beautiful film ever to come out of Disney because it was stylized. Do you agree?

Thomas: Yes. Yes, I do. I’ve always been of the opinion that a key component to what makes something “art” is the raw skill and effort behind it and when I look at something done by Eyvind Earle it looks almost impossible to me, especially coming from a time before digital tools. At best we’re doing a mere homage, and I hope he would approve.

Wecks: So now the money is in the bank — okay, a lot of money is in the bank, more than expected. I know you mention it in some of your Kickstarter updates, but go over for our audience how that money is going to improve the game.

The Banner Saga will possibly be the first of the recent large Kickstarter campaigns to bring a video game to market

Thomas: Well, when we set out to make the game with our own personal savings, we really were making a lot of compromises and cutting back the content to its bare minimum. We intended to add it over time and try to message that this was a humble indie project which we’d be expanding.

When we came to our initial goal of $100,000, we factored in the cut Kickstarter and Amazon would take and we would use everything left to get contract help on programming, interface, animation, quality assurance and implementation. If we met that goal we would essentially be paying for the time we needed to add all of our base features back in, like a longer story, more events during travel, more characters in combat and so on. When we hit 200%, we were ecstatic because it bought us some breathing room for polish and even more content.

At 300% we were starting to wonder what we were going to do with the funds, which is a weird position to be in. At this point we didn’t want to turn the game into some uncontrollable monster and we didn’t want to grow the company and change the culture of the project. We started looking into ways to not just do more content but improve the quality. We were thrilled out of our minds to get Austin Wintory on for the soundtrack and some really big talent for sound and animation. The numbers kept going up and we weren’t even feeding the fire.

At 550% we hadn’t even given backers a goal to shoot for. At that point we had received so many emails and comments asking what extra funding would do for the game that with three days left in the campaign we thought we’d just bring out the kind of stretch goals we never expected to see happen, like a full orchestra and city building, an idea that had always been on our mind but we dismissed as way beyond the scope of our game. Once again, the extra funding would allow us to put trained people on some systems while we continued to develop these new additions. For the record, we absolutely did not expect to hit 700%. Madness.

It is interesting to see how people correlate money with content, as if you just liquify a vat of cash and pour it into a computer and voila, another set of characters! I would imagine every big project is putting those funds directly into hiring people onto the project, and a good programmer, for example, might cost $120k a year or more. We’re not hiring full-time positions to keep our costs down, but for massive projects like Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland or Shadowrun that’s probably where the majority of the money’s going. I’m curious how backers think the money is getting spent, and what they find acceptable and unacceptable.

Wecks: Over at Penny Arcade there is an article about how often Kickstarter video games can disappoint because people buy into a concept but the studio is not able to follow through on their promises. After such a successful campaign is there part of you which feels like you have to make this game almost perfect to live up to expectations? How do you plan to make sure that you deliver a product which lives up to the hype?

Thomas: I had read this, in fact! Kickstarter is in an interesting position because on one hand they came up as a place where people could get some funding to follow their dreams on small and quirky art projects or gizmos, and some would fail to deliver but it only affected a few people. Double Fine transformed that completely in one day and even though they weren’t the first to hit a million, they single-handedly created a movement.

It’s probably not a bad thing for potential backers to have a sort of “buyer beware” attitude about the whole thing, but at the same time I think the core idea and good will driving the whole thing is eroded by cynicism. I’m not all doom-y about it personally; I think Kickstarter will have growing pains, probably a few major disappointments and a period where it re-establishes itself as a trustworthy source. I’d love nothing more than this current wave of love to become the standard, but I think that’s going to be up to the developers and the backers, not Kickstarter.

It is interesting that Stoic is probably going to be the first ones with a real product out the door and managing expectations is going to be a huge part of making sure everybody’s satisfied with the result. We know we won’t be able to live up to everyone’s expectations but I’m really thankful that we showed the actual game, what it looks like, and what we’re trying to do with it. I think transparency will probably be key; nothing upsets people like feeling betrayed or mislead.

I’m curious to see how Double Fine Adventure pans out – even though I’m unrepentantly 100% behind whatever crazy idea they come up with, I have this nagging suspicion that at least a quarter of the backers will feel passionately betrayed that it isn’t exactly what THEY envisioned, no matter what it is or how good it turns out. It’s funny, I remember talking about how if we somehow hit a million we’d probably be screwed. You’re right, expectation is probably going to be the hardest thing to manage, and nothing sets that expectation like everyone having a direct line to your bank account.

Wecks: I would throw in something like “sucks to be you,” at this point, but I, uh, guess I can’t say that to someone who just got $700,000 from Kickstarter. Sky-high expectations just come with the territory, don’t they?

Thomas: I’m not sure I have much more to offer here than “yeah.” The interesting thing about expectations is that they’re always relative; Double Fine and inXile raised around 3 million each, Shadowrun is looking to hit somewhere around 2 million and that, by default, means that we’re a smaller game, which is probably true. It’s hard to say because none of those projects have said anything about their scope or even shown a screenshot. Still, compared to coming out with no expectation beyond our own work history, it creates a special sort of pressure we didn’t have before.

Wecks: One of the things Arnie emphasized in the Kickstarter film was that the three of you felt the need to leave your work at mainstream studios to do The Banner Saga. Why? What was it about work at big studios which would have hampered your ability to pull this off? What was it they would have wrecked?

Thomas: To get this out of the way up front, a group of production-level employees pitching an idea for a game to their current publisher just isn’t how it works. It was never an option, and I don’t mean the chances were slim, I mean there’s no system in place to do it. If you want to make your own game you literally have to leave your job, or you have to be an executive with marketing data and focus tests to support your idea. In terms of shopping the idea to other publishers, it just didn’t make financial sense.

We’ve each been in the industry long enough to understand how game developers are becoming a big commodity — they’re businesses. They’re trying to make money, and I really don’t blame them. You have to produce something that makes a profit for the publisher, yourself, and funds the publisher’s other products. A niche product selling 100,000 copies of a $10 game won’t do that. They need to shoot for thirty million copies of a $60 game, and turn-based viking strategy ain’t gonna cut it. On the other hand, if all we need to do is fund three guys’ salaries, that’s a completely different story. That’s what’s so amazing about the rise of digital distribution and resources like Kickstarter – it’s actually making small production studios viable in a way we’ve never seen before.

Wecks: I guess that isn’t surprising to me. I still find it sad though. One of the things our current corporate culture just doesn’t do well is listen to its own. Here you have passionate devoted fans of games who have all the tribal knowledge and technical know-how to make outstanding content and the corporations have no way to sniff out the ideas already existing among their staff. I bet there are a million good ideas discussed around the tables in the cafeterias every year. Do you see any way to change that? Let’s say you were the head of a major publisher for a day. What would you do to find the ideas floating around in the cubicles?

Thomas: Interesting question, which I’ve never been asked before. For me it always comes back to what you are trying to accomplish. If you want to make huge blockbuster games like GTA you need to hedge your bets or carefully grow your existing game franchises. You can’t just brute force people into loving your idea. If you want to make brilliant, sparkling, original niche games you have to be ready to accept low sales figures, budget accordingly, and hope that the game blows up bigger than you predicted. I think the common misconception is that a good idea is the most important thing to success. I don’t agree with that or by the cosmic laws of justice Mount and Blade would be more popular than Angry Birds.

That said, if I’m not pretending to run a major publishing enterprise, I don’t have to obsess about the bottom line, and that’s why we went independent. In the spirit of the question though, if I were just in charge of digging up the gems and turning them into great games, I’d probably go about it similar to Valve, whose Employee Handbook has conveniently been leaked to the public recently, but even that is a precarious balancing act. Talented and creative people flourish in an environment where they pursue their own goals and feel genuinely trusted to be autonomous. They can be happy working from a spreadsheet and find joy in their tiny corner of development but that satisfaction only lasts as long as the developer feels like they’re growing. Ultimately, we can’t all be that one guy calling the shots, which brings me to my last point; developers being encouraged to create their own start-ups isn’t the worst thing in the world, either.

Wecks: Too true, especially with Kickstarter out there to back them! So give us a sense of your time line when will we be seeing a beta test? When do you plan to have the game completed?

Thomas: We expect our first release to be this summer. It’ll be a demo of sorts which lets you play a free standalone of the combat portion of the game in which you can fight online or by yourself through a simple narrative that is a prologue of sorts to the single-player game. The first part of our single player trilogy, which was the focus of our Kickstarter campaign, is expected to be out by the end of the year. That said, we’ve already warned people in the latest update that despite our best efforts the scope of the game has clearly expanded and it may push us out a few months. We’ll do our best!

Wecks: Well I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am looking forward to seeing the results.

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